Meet the 10K Apart Winners

Responsive apps under 10K

Last year’s 10K Apart challenged readers to create the best application they could using no more than 10K of images, scripts, and markup. We wanted to see what you could do with HTML5, CSS3, and web fonts, and you blew us away.

For this year’s contest, we asked you to step up your game by not only awing us with brilliant (and brilliantly designed) apps built using less than 10K of web standards and imagery, but we also insisted you make those awesome apps fully responsive.

(If you found this page by accident, responsive design accommodates today’s dizzying array of notebooks, tablets, smartphones, laptops, and big-screen desktops—and anticipates tomorrow’s—via fluid design experiences that squash and stretch and swell and shrink and always look like ladies. Ethan Marcotte pioneered this design approach, which takes standards-based progressive enhancement to the next level, and which achieves its magic via fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. But I digress.)

We worried. Oh, how we worried.

We worried that demanding responsive design on top of our already tough list of requirements would kill the contest. That it was just too hard. Maybe even impossible. Silly us.

Once again, you overwhelmed us with your out-of-the-box creativity, dazzling technical chops, and inspiring can-do spirit. During the few weeks of our call for entries, people and teams from 36 countries produced 128 astonishingly excellent apps. With that many great entries, judging was a beast! Fortunately we had excellent help. But enough about us. On to the winners!

In addition to these four winners, there are twelve honorable mentions that will delight any visitor—and astonish any web designer-developer who tries to figure out how these wizards worked their magic in under 10K. See all the winners or view the entire gallery and decide whom you would have awarded best in show.

P.S. We love you

The 10K Apart hearkens back to Stewart Butterfield’s 5k Contest of yesteryear. Back then, Stewart challenged web designer-developers to create something magical using less than 5K of code and images—and the community responded with a flowering of creativity and awesome proto-web-apps. Stewart, we salute you!